Poet and essayist Dawn Potter founded this archive as a way to organize her commentary on Milly Jourdain's poetry, which, at the suggestion of biographer Hilary Spurling, she is gradually reprinting online. If you have more information about Milly Jourdain's life or work, please be in touch.

Saturday, November 14, 2009

First published on June 12, 2009

A few days ago, I received, with great pleasure, an email from biographer Hilary Spurling about my review of Milly Jourdain's forgotten 1924 poetry collection Unfulfilment. I hope she will not mind my sharing a few of her thoughts:

"You & I are almost certainly her only living readers, and we think alike. Re-reading her poems--the ones I quoted, & the ones you did--makes me sure we're right. A faint kinship in her neatness & low tone, & her sentiment or lack of it, with Emily Dickinson, don't you think? 'tiny sounds like dry and restless sobs' or the drifting rain & trailing smoke of dreams in 'Watching the Meet'. Of course she was always a guttering flame & soon snuffed out--you are the only reader who ever mentioned her to me--and I can't tell you how glad I am you did--and to know that pale flame burns again in Maine."

But today Hilary and I are not Milly's only living readers because you've read a few of her poems too. And Hilary wonders if I should, once a week or so, post one or another of her poems here. Maybe I'll do that, and maybe I'll also post them in their published order. It seems like a small gift to Milly and also, I hope, a small gift to Hilary, who first recognized their worth.

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About Milly Jourdain

Milly Jourdain (1872-1926), who wrote under the pseudonym "Joan Arden," was the author of two books: A Childhood, which was a semi-fictional memoir, and Unfulfilment, a collection of poetrypublished in 1924 by Basil Blackwell. I first came across Milly’s poems as I was reading Hilary Spurling’s 1984 biography of Ivy Compton-Burnett, whose longtime companion, Margaret Jourdain, was Milly’s older sister. In addition to Margaret, an expert on furniture and the decorative arts, there were other fairly well known Jourdains in this large family: Philip, a mathematician and philosopher; Frank, a pioneering ornithologist; and Eleanor, who with a friend wrote a peculiar book in which they claimed to have seen the ghost of Marie Antoinette at Versailles.

Milly was the baby of the family and, like Philip, suffered from a hereditary disease known as Friedrich's ataxia, a rapidly advancing form of multiple sclerosis. Milly lived much of her life in isolation and great pain and died at the age of forty-four.

All biographical information about Milly Jourdain has been gleaned from Hilary Spurling's excellent biography of Ivy Compton-Burnett. As of now, I have been able to find no other source of information. But I am not a professional researcher, merely a regular writer and reader, so more information must certainly exist, somewhere.

A note: Milly Jourdain's poems are now in the public domain and are therefore legal to reprint. My commentary is not. I'm delighted to disseminate Milly's work, but please be kind about acknowledging your source, as I, in turn, have tried my best to do for Hilary Spurling.